Weather Update panel applet broken?

I assume the server is down but, if so, it has been about a week now.

I started using Xfce on my laptop when Fedora went to Gnome 3. At that time the weather applet in the panel worked. Later it broke when the server became no longer available. Recently I switched to Xubuntu and was delighted to see that the weather applet worked again. And now it is broken again.

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

Appears to be - and have been - functioning fine here on my computer at my location (United States). It takes spells when it shows that I am experiencing rain when I am not, but that is nothing new and the rest of the data appears to be reasonably accurate. I still miss the GNOME panel applet weather app's capability of allowing me to visit the NOAA website, snag a link to the (non-java version, IIRC) animated weather radar image of my location, paste it into the applet's settings, and then having an up-to-date animated weather radar image in the applet; I wish the author/maintainer of XFCE's weather applet would implement the radar image function (and allow the user to set it to a custom image location, so the trick would work for it as well).

Might double-check your settings. If that does not help, IDK, perhaps try setting a different location in order to learn whether it is an issue with your particular location (server not recognizing it, has stopped collecting data for it, et cetera) or with your computer/setup.

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

I have the same problem. Running Debian 7 wheezy with Openbox and xfce4 panel + weather applet. It is working fine on debian testing virtual machine. Also it is not working on Ubuntu LTS with xfce4. The applet can't connect to find the desired location, or if its location was set previously, it can't connect to the server, to fetch the data.

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

What version of the plugin are you using? An older version stopped working due to a change with the weather channel feed (https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8105). Perhaps you've been affected by this bug. The current version, 0.8.3, is working fine here.

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

ToZ wrote:

What version of the plugin are you using? An older version stopped working due to a change with the weather channel feed (https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8105). Perhaps you've been affected by this bug. The current version, 0.8.3, is working fine here.

Thanks. I followed the instructions at the link above to upgrade my Xubuntu 12.04 to 4.10 via PPA. All went well, and the weather applet is now working (even better features than the old one), but I now have a couple of new problems.

I use only one panel and I keep it at the left at 124 pixels wide. After the upgrade to 4.10:

1) The Places applet now shows "Places" (I use label only, no icon) left justified instead of centered. It still works fine, but looks weird. There may be a way to add some regex command in the Label box where you can type in what you want the label to say, but I can't find any documentation for the syntax.

2) The Window Buttons applet is set to show icons only, no label, but the icons now al appear 124 pixels square, where previously they were four across. I can't find any place to change this.

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

John_Jason_Jordan wrote:

1) The Places applet now shows "Places" (I use label only, no icon) left justified instead of centered. It still works fine, but looks weird. There may be a way to add some regex command in the Label box where you can type in what you want the label to say, but I can't find any documentation for the syntax.

A quick fix is to add spaces before the label "Places" in the places properties to center it.

2) The Window Buttons applet is set to show icons only, no label, but the icons now al appear 124 pixels square, where previously they were four across. I can't find any place to change this.

I'm not sure how it worked on 4.8, but I if I understand correctly, I can't seem to get mutliple buttons per row myself. In fact, according to this link, it doesn't appear that you can change the icon size. Would you happen to have a screenshot of how it worked before?

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

ToZ wrote:

I'm not sure how it worked on 4.8, but I if I understand correctly, I can't seem to get mutliple buttons per row myself. In fact, according to this link, it doesn't appear that you can change the icon size. Would you happen to have a screenshot of how it worked before?

I also have Xubuntu on my laptop and I have not yet done the PPA update to 4.10 on it, so the Window Buttons applet is still working in its panel. The desktop where I did the PPA upgrade used to display the same thing before the upgrade.

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

ToZ wrote:

I see. Just had a look around 4.10 and I can't configure the buttons like that either. Maybe you should create a bug report about functionality that has been lost.

I suppose I could file a bug report, once I figure out where and how to file bug reports. In the meantime, I wonder if I could somehow add the new weather applet to my 4.8 laptop (where the screenshot above was taken). That is, leave the laptop on 4.8, and just remove the existing 4.8 weather applet and add the new 4.10 weather applet.

That works! Thanks for posting it. I just used it to update the weather applet alone on my Xubuntu 12.04 laptop. And that is all that it updated, so my Window Buttons are still the way they were in the image I uploaded previously. Note that if you do this you will have to remove the weather applet from your panel and then add it back before it will work.

I wish I had done this to my desktop instead of upgrading the whole PPA, which broke the window buttons. I wonder if I can revert the desktop to 4.8, then repeat the above to fix just the weather applet.

Someone ought to add the above to the Xubuntu bug report as a temporary workaround.

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

I have 0.8.3 and it is amazing how useful this app is getting, as they have added a lot of stuff on it that makes it really worthwhile to have.As an extra, don't know if this is the place to note about it, but I have a idea that I think would be really neat to add to this app, and it looks like it would be easy to do. If I knew anything about programming, I would get the source and do it myself.When you click on the app from the panel, you get a screen with two tabs, "Forecast" and "Details".What would be neat is to allow the user to add one or more tabs here so that the user could add a URL thatwould link to their local radar, etc., and they could label the tab as "Local Radar", whatever.Just an idea.

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

I wonder if I can revert the desktop to 4.8, then repeat the above to fix just the weather applet.

I've come across a few references to ppa-purge whose purpose is to do just that. Here is a link about it. See the "How to Purge a PPA" section. I've had no personal experience with this command.

Success!

It was scary, but I used the ppa-purge technique as outlined in the above URL to remove the 4.10 PPA repository. It took forever and listed tons of frightening things that it was doing. When it finsihed the desktop did not change, so I decided to do a complete shutdown and restart. When Xubuntu 12.04 came back up my panel was trash. As you recall from the image I posted above, it was on the left, 124 pixels wide. After rebooting it was horizontal, about an inch high and five inches wide, with absolutely nothing in it. Normally, this would be highly annoying, but I wanted it to appear exactly as it does on my Xubuntu laptop, sitting right next to the desktop computer. So I just cycled through the properties for the panel and all the items in it on my laptop and applied them to the desktop panel. That is, all but the weather applet. And I am happy to report that the Window Buttons appear in rows as they did before. Yay! And even the Places label is centered again.

Then I used ergatif's method above to temporarily install the dtl131/mediahacks PPA, and then install the weather applet, and finally remove the PPA. It worked again perfectly, just as it did the other day on my laptop.

My desktop computer is back the way I want it, with a working weather applet in the panel. Many thanks to all who contributed here.

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

This is working only for ubuntu. Can someone tell me how to do this for debian 7 ?

Edit:

How to update this package from source in debian 7.

1. Go to Link and download the xfce4-weather-plugin_0.8.3.orig.tar.bz2 file.2. Unpack it somewhere you like.3. Open a terminal and navigate to the unpacked files.4. Install all the dependencies that are shown in to the link above.

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

I solved the problem as I posted on 10/28/2013 above. However, now I have the reverse problem. I have a brand new laptop that I have installed Xubuntu 13.10 on. The weather applet is fine because it is using the later Xfce. But now my window buttons are ridiculous. (See the screenshot posted above to see how I have the panel on the left side rather than the top or bottom.) What I need to do is leave Xfce alone, but install the older window buttons applet instead of the one that comes with this version. Basically, I need to find out what package provides the window buttons applet. Does anyone know?

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

WiseGuy1020 wrote:

You can install the patched weather applet from the proposed updates repo.

That is fine for those running the older Xfce that comes with Ubuntu 12.04. But I now have the newer Xfce that comes with 13.10, so I already have the new weather applet. What I need is the older windows buttons applet from the 12.04 version of Xfce.

Sorry, I am at the university, not at home with my computer, so I don't know the version numbers of Xfce that I am talking about - all I can say is "the version that comes with 12.04" vs. "the version that comes with 13.10."

If I knew what package provides the windows buttons applet I might be able to downgrade it so my window buttons will work correctly.

Re: Weather Update panel applet broken?

Solved:

It took me several hours of googling, but I finally found out how to get the icons in the 4.10 window buttons applet not to take up the entire width of the panel when your panel is on the left. I had set the width of the panel to 124 pixels, which worked fine on my 1920 x 1080 screen, and the number of rows to 1. What I should have done was set the number of *rows* to 4, and the width of the panel down to 32 or so. After doing this the panel is just as wide as it was when I had it set to 124 pixels, but now I have four rows of icons in the window buttons applet, and each icon is an appropriate size.